A Socio-Technical Account of an Internet-Based Self-Service Technology Implementation: Why Call-Centres Sometimes 'Prevail' in a Multi-Channel Context?

Despite the rampant growth in technology-based service delivery options, the implementation of these contemporary forms of service channels continues to be risky and problematic for organisations. Current conceptualisations of IS implementation is rather narrow and highlights only particular aspects of this phenomenon. This paper adopts a socio-technical lens to enhance our understanding of the implementation of an Internet-based self-service technology (ISST) at a major South African healthcare insurance firm. Actor-Network theory’s (ANT) key conceptual elements of inscription and translation are used to describe how the design and use of this self-service technology emerged from the co-entanglement between the technological and social. Drawing from a field study, this paper demonstrates the complex interdependencies and interactions among contrasting social, political, economic and technological issues and therefore advances implementation theory for these contemporary service channels in yet another important way. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-1559-5.ch005